Film About a Cult Aims to be More Than a Cult Hit

To hear them tell it, the deluge of critical acclaim that “Sound of My Voice” has enjoyed in the past three months almost didn’t happen: after being accepted by the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, filmmaker Zal Batmanglij and star/co-writer Brit Marling still weren’t finished with the film, and didn’t complete a cut until two days after the festival was underway. Two months later, they’re playing to a sellout crowd on the opening night of the South By Southwest film festival, and the film’s examination of a couple inducted into a cult feels like a prophetic encapsulation of the fandom they’ve enjoyed seemingly overnight. (The film follows a couple who attempts to infiltrate a cult and expose it as a fraud only to discover their faith tested when its leader, played by Marling, turns out to be far more convincing than they expect.)

Speakeasy sat down with Marling and Batmanglij in Austin to discuss “Sound of My Voice,” and the duo not only talked about defining the world within the film, but designing its purposeful ambiguity in order to keep audiences guessing.

Speakeasy: How many concrete decisions did you make about what was actually going on with main character Maggie, her cult, and the way the characters were responding to her?

Zal Batmanglij: I guess the answer to that question is that we ourselves don’t know the answers, and I think that is why the film works, because we are not being didactic. We’re just asking questions, and trying our best; is there an answer to who Maggie is? Yes, there is definitely an answer to who Maggie is. Only five people know the answer to that question, and we’re not going to say that.

Brit Marling: And then there’s the ultimate underlying debate, which is, is the world mundane and ordinary, or is it ethereal and extraordinary? I don’t think we’ve made up our minds about that either, in general. That’s the truth of where we are as human beings on planet Earth, and so the film really isn’t trying to convince you one way or the other.

Batmanglij: Actually the coolest part for me is that each single person chooses for themselves – are they a believer or not a believer. It’s so funny to get people’s reactions after the movie.

As Maggie, did you determine how much she really believed everything that she said, as opposed to just manipulating the cult members?

Marling: It’s probably better for me not to tell you what I was thinking or feeling. But I guess I will say that I spent a lot of time doing homework on this character, and a lot of that homework came from our writing process. So by the time I started to do homework as an actor, I’d lived in her skin for a while. I don’t want to say what I felt, but whether or not she is a time traveler, it’s a metaphor for a much larger thing, which is that we are all riddled with self-doubt and we all have things we aspire to be and want to do – but can we really do it? I think Maggie becomes is a metaphor of that, that combination of strength and ambition and also vulnerability and brokenness.

But you did decide definitively, at least in your head?

Marling: I know, yeah. I know and he knows.

Batmanglij: We know. The other actors don’t know. Chris doesn’t know, Nicole doesn’t know, no one else knows, not even our producer.

So what is the next step for you guys with his movie?

Batmanglij: I think either theatrical distribution, or maybe doing a TV series from it, so those are our two options.

In terms of doing a TV series, how far along have you conceived the mythology?

Batmanglij: All the way to the end. The last chapter – the last two scenes of the show, so whatever that is, seven seasons down, five seasons down, three seasons down, you’ll find out what that might be.

Marling: I think one of the great things about this story is that it came out as this whole universe, and we really thought through everything. The work has already been done, and now it’s really the question of are we going to have the chance to tell it – and I really hope so.

Would you rather explore it in long form over a series of episodes, or as a self-contained feature?

Batmanglij: I think we are asking ourselves that question right now. What would you say? I think a series would just be a continuation – the next scene, the next chapter. It wouldn’t be like a procedural; it would be a serial. But I don’t think you can have both necessarily – a theatrical release, and then a TV series. It’s going to be one or the other

Marling: I don’t know, I think you could have both I think that this standalone work could enter the world, and inspire a series from there. I think it could work in a lot of ways. I would just be excited to get to the ending, because there is an ending, and for the like one or two other people who have heard it, when we tell it, it seems to have real emotional impact. So it would be nice to get to that place, because a lot of times when you are dealing with really high concept ideas, you spend the first movie just laying out the high concept, and in the second and third, people already know the concept and now you can really begin to dig in to the meat of like how the concept creates interesting relationships.